Charles hesitated no longer and hurried as quickly as possible to Repington Hall. The canary-coloured footmen received him with extreme deference, and he found the wide polished staircase quite easy to climb. He had been a little afraid of his uncle's sentimental reminiscence, but as it turned out his fears were groundless. Nothing was said about the past and the conversation was almost entirely of a financial character. He spent the remainder of the summer with Sir George Repington at Scarborough, returning early in the autumn to form the establishment of his new residence, Dragon Lodge.
He bought a monocle of such thickness that the human countenance seen through its glass was reduced to the merest pin-point. He procured two Chinese mutes—Heaven knows how or where—but their names were Ho and No. His eccentricities would exhaust another volume of description. He was the famous Beau who appeared on the first of the month in a light-coloured suit that gradually deepened until, on the last day of the month, it always achieved blackness. When asked by somebody the reason of this mode he replied that he was mourning the flight of time: when asked farther why he was not perpetually funereal in his costume he replied that the first day of the month always revived his hopes of immortality. It was observed, however, that in April his dress did not alter and those who rashly inquired the reason for this exception were severely rebuked for their curiosity. His library was one of the finest in England, although it did not contain a single copy of Curtain Polls. The Great Dr. Johnson on one occasion complimented him upon the selection of his authors, the decorousness of his bindings, and the rigidity of his ladders.
As Mr. Ripple had prophesied, the indiscretions of his past in course of time acquired a romantick mystery of their own. He was credited in turn with a faithless wife immured in a Gothick dungeon in the North-West of the Island of Sicily, with a prodigiously passionate affair with a German princess in which he was said to have pinked four Royal Dukes, and with innumerable other entanglements quite impossible to recount. All these tales only added to his prestige, while his wealth and amiability gave him a reputation second to none of the Beaux of the past. He wrote a number of verses, but never published another volume, and was probably the original whom Sir Benjamin Backbite copied, though his reasons for not printing were quite different from those of the later fop.
He would sometimes return early from assembly, rout, or ridotto to pay a visit to Mr. Ripple. He would usually find the latter engaged in a game of picket with Sir George Repington; and, after entertaining the two old gentlemen with a witty and satirical account of the evening's entertainment, he would walk slowly back to Dragon Lodge, stare meditatively at the new motto he had adopted, Fui decorus, step into a small ivory room that opened out of the massive library and take from a cedar-wood drawer a white swansdown muff.
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